Greetings, Wow. Can you believe it? It is the final part in my four part series about Time Management and Organization
This is Part Four – Discipline Yourself AND To Corral Data, Set ONE Location for it ALL
Seems pretty simple, to set ONE Location for ALL Data – but half of our time wasters = spending a lot of time looking for important information and notes when ONE notebook or ONE electronic device (that sync’s with ALL others) should do the trick. You could also use your phone and set alerts for your to do list or reminders. Same problem, chronic problem, same conditions, same time wasted over the course of many different days.
When we do find what we’re looking for, the time is gone and so is our desire to do much of anything else. Setting ONE location for ALL data will require a little discipline. If you have a ton of notebooks like me, and with so many forms to use (post-it notes, note book, spiral, hard cover, journal, back of restaurant napkin -really you too?- phone, laptop, desktop, tablet), using ONE “notebook” for everything will be difficult at first. So choose one notebook and hide the others to trick yourself into having only one available.
AND here’s a compromise – you get one paper form and ONE electronic format. If that seems crazy, find the “notepad” feature on your phone and you can write in your tablet/electronic device with your finger or a stylus and keep track of the notes that way (be sure to name them appropriately with a basic file name so you can find them later). IF you are not sure how to sync your devices, ask/research/watch YouTube or you shouldn’t be using it at all, because this is how information is loss of left out. It doesn’t seem like it but each little piece of time spent looking, then translates to late arrivals, submitting work that is sub par, missing events entirely or showing up unprepared.
IF you write something on a post-it note, use some washi tape and adhere it to the inside of your notebook. The other important part is ensure that items are grouped together – you could use tabs, post-it flags or a multi-subject notebook that has different colored pages/tabs. Group things together, like Children, Husband, Work, Personal, Household, Holiday, and etc. Whatever you need based on the subject will be in ONE location making it easier to find.
Remember, time management and organization are close friends. You really shouldn’t have one without the other and the one, will make the other possible. Not only that, who doesn’t want more time, more money in their day? When you make time to manage what you want/need to do and to get organized, imagine the other stuff you could also do with a few free minutes, or an additional hour? Imagine the peace of mind you have knowing you’ve got everything under control. And imagine the less you will spend (both time AND money) when you put everything in its place and can locate it without incident or wasted time and effort?
These series of blog posts are not meant to be professional advice, BUT if you’re not very organized or feel you could be better at it, it is a place to START with the basics. I’m pretty organized and I like it that way. I don’t like chaos. I don’t get where I’m going and do all that I have, want and need to do being disorganized and what’s more, when people trust that you know what you’re doing, that you can handle multiple tasks and keep it together, they’ll give you more responsibilities. Those “detailed oriented”, “ability to prioritize tasks” and “ability to handle multiple projects” are not just things on a resume, they are competencies everyone is seeking to gain and if you can do those, you’ll have ultimate success in any endeavor.
Being organized and making good use of your time is a wonderful feeling and an accomplishable goal we should all work more diligently to achieve.